It’s me again, back in The Wall Street Journal with another edition of “Sightings,” my new biweekly column about the arts. The subject, needless to say, is Harold Pinter:
Nothing could have been less unexpected than the news that Harold Pinter had won the Nobel Prize for literature. The only surprise was that he deserved it–which probably wasn’t why he got it.
That Mr. Pinter is a distinguished writer is beyond doubt. To be sure, we haven’t seen much of his work on Broadway in recent years, but the Roundabout Theatre Company’s 2003 revival of “The Caretaker” (1960), a dark comedy about a tramp and two brothers who share a rundown house, served as a valuable reminder that while his opaque, elliptical style has long since hardened into mannerism, Mr. Pinter really did earn his reputation as one of the key voices in postwar British drama. Even No